


The Birthday Party

by keepitmythy



Series: Unqualified Heroes [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Beck has kind of a bad day, Foreshadowing, Gen, Good Guy Quentin Beck, Magic and Science, Peter's birthday doesn't go quite as planned, a lot of foreshadowing, for something that won't be posted for several months, i guess a little bit of whump?, not gonna lie, so enjoy the ominous forshadowing I guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-07-28 07:11:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20060068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keepitmythy/pseuds/keepitmythy
Summary: GuyInTheChair:Ok, so what’s the plan, again?Arachnikid:May and I are going to pick you and MJ up around noon, get to the airport around one. Plane leaves at four so that should be plenty of time. Matt, are you sure you don’t want to come? We can still get a ticket.DevilYouKnow:Nah, I’m good. Someone’s gotta keep the city safe while you all are gone.Dahlia:Beck’s coming, though, right?FishbowlHead:I’ll meet you at the airport. Perks of Sorcerery means never taking normal transportation.Arachnikid:Except for, apparently, planes.Otherwise known as, Peter is ecstatic to spend his birthday in Wakanda with his friends. Safety protocols are ignored, and things don't go quite as planned.





	The Birthday Party

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally titled "Getting to Know You" and had a slightly different plot, but then I figured out plot for the future and decided to use this more as a setup. It was also originally split into two chapters, but I liked the flow better as one, so I guess you're welcome for a longer update all at once? Pretty much directly follows "Civilian Life"

**GuyInTheChair:** Ok, so what’s the plan, again?

**Arachnikid: **May and I are going to pick you and MJ up around noon, get to the airport around one. Plane leaves at four so that should be plenty of time. Matt, are you sure you don’t want to come? We can still get a ticket.

**DevilYouKnow:** Nah, I’m good. Someone’s gotta keep the city safe while you all are gone.

**Dahlia:** Beck’s coming, though, right?

**FishbowlHead: **I’ll meet you at the airport. Perks of Sorcerery means never taking normal transportation.

**Arachnikid: **Except for, apparently, planes.

**FishbowlHead: **You know, some would consider it rude to portal into someone’s home

**YourQueen: **And I asked him nicely

**GuyInTheChair: **I see

**Dahlia: **See you guys tomorrow!

-

It was August. The hype surrounding Peter as Spider-Man had died down much faster than Peter had expected – maybe it was the fact that superheroes having public identities had always been the norm. Or maybe it was Pepper Potts’ army of rabid lawyers ready to destroy anyone who tried to go after Peter. He was, after all, still a minor, and entitled to a certain amount of privacy.

What this meant for Peter, though, was that he could go out during the day wearing the patented Avengers’ disguise of a hat and sunglasses and go about his normal life with minimal interference from the general public.

Even the handful of powered criminals he had fought over the past few years seemed unwilling to go after him directly. Fights on patrol were just as dangerous and near deadly as they always had been, but no one since Mysterio seemed willing to go after Peter Parker or his loved ones directly. Apparently, there were lines that they wouldn’t cross. Not yet, anyway.

His fame did lead to some odd moments of recognition, however. Like now, for instance, as Team Parker stood in line in the Newark airport, waiting to go through security. Of the whole group, however, it was Beck that seemed the most nervous and twitchy.

He had met the rest of the group of May, Peter, MJ, and Ned at the entrance to the airport, and his bad mood seemed to have started when his luggage was deemed too oversized to be carried on, and as such, would have to be checked. This lead to the moment twenty minutes later as they stood in line for the TSA screening when Beck realized that he had left his sling ring in his luggage.

If he were smart, he would have simply opened a small portal and left his luggage back at home in the Sanctum. No one, however, had recently accused Quentin Beck of having much in the department of quick-thinking common sense.

This, combined with unfamiliar security procedures, the number of odd looks the group as a whole was receiving as the other people in line realized they were standing near both Spider-Man and Mysterio, and an unfamiliar mode of travel on the horizon for Beck meant that he was nervous, twitchy, and not at all looking forward to an almost fifteen hour flight, even if it would be in relative luxury on a Stark Industries jet.

Ned, MJ, and May were already through security when it happened. The guard took Peter’s passport and boarding pass, looked at it, then looked back to Peter. “You that Spider-Kid from YouTube?”

“Me? Nah.” Peter tried to grab his paperwork back, catching Beck’s eye as he did.

Beck looked like he was going to start laughing, but kept a serious look on his face as the guard called out, “Hey Bill! It’s the Spider-Kid!”

Great. Now everyone’s looking. Peter was turning bright red, and from the other side of the security terminal May and the others were starting to laugh. It definitely got the attention of the crowd.

Of course, Beck couldn’t avoid attention himself. As soon as the fourth guard came over to investigate the growing disturbance and tried to keep the line going by looking at Beck’s paperwork, the cries of “It’s Spider-Man!” became “It’s Spider-Man _and _Mysterio!”

At that point there wasn’t much they could do. Autographs were signed, pictures were taken, and then the five of them had to sprint across the airport to get to where their plane was.

Despite the fact that it was a Stark Industries jet, it wouldn’t be just the five of them on the plane. Stark Industries had several agreements with the Wakandan Technology Outreach program, and Pepper had managed to work it out that there would be a transport going a day before Peter’s birthday that they could hitch a ride on along with a number of Stark Industries staff leaving for Wakanda, and Wakandan engineers returning from their time in the States.

That being said, Team Parker would still have a small, relatively private, area of the cabin set aside for them. Ned and Peter immediately set up their laptops, continuing to work together on their current project on their private Minecraft server. MJ sat nearby, reading her book and occasionally tossing out suggestions on how to better construct their current project, which was a life-size replica of the old Avengers Tower.

May was relaxing for once, listening to an audiobook as she stared out the window and sipped at a glass of champaign.

Beck, unsure of what one does on an airplane, decided to try to sleep for at least part of the fifteen hour flight.

-

It’s been said before that Sorcerers don’t dream like normal people. This dream was no different. It took a few moments for Beck to realize that he wasn’t awake, sitting at a long table covered in food, surrounded by people he didn’t know.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There were a few vaguely familiar people in the crowd, people he might have met at some point. As he carefully stood away from the table, he properly recognized a handful of people across the room. Peter, there he was. Clint. Pepper.

Beck’s dream self had only a moment to relax before things started going off the rails. It started with a faint vibration beneath his feet, an overwhelming scent of ozone in the air.

The scent of Magic.

Beck looked around frantically, finally catching the eye of Strange, who was also standing up. The vibration grew stronger, knocking dust from the ceiling high above down onto the assembled group. The low murmur of conversation stopped as the crowd began to realize something was terribly wrong.

Then he saw it. It started out small, a distortion barely the size of a grapefruit hovering at chest height in the center of the room. It warped and expanded, bearing superficial resemblance to the portals that Beck had made a thousand times, but had nothing of the sharp, clean lines those portals had.

The edges shimmered and warped, dripping golden magic that had a strange tarnished quality rather than the bright red-gold Beck knew. People surged away from the opening portal, pushing themselves towards the edges of the room as the vibrations continued to increase in strength.

A chunk of the ceiling fell, dropping next to Beck just as he finished his set of combat readiness spells.

“Mister Beck?”

No, no, not now. Beck was focusing on the portal, watching as it reached its full size, dust and rubble spilling out.

“Mister Beck!”

There were figures in the smoke, Beck could see them. Not many. Two, maybe three. A flash of red. A flash of black. Then-

“Quentin!”

Beck was pulled out of the dream, momentarily completely disoriented. He realized, offhandedly, that he had unconsciously begun putting up a shield, golden magic illuminating the darkened interior of the cabin. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves, dismissed the shield, and looked over at Peter, who hadn’t yet let go of his shoulder.

“Mister Beck, are you alright?” The kid looked genuinely concerned, Beck realized. The fragments of the dream were slipping away faster than usual. Nothing sticking other than the image of the utterly wrong portal, gaping open in an unfamiliar place, people coming through…

Beck took a deep breath to steady himself, meeting Peter’s gaze with a curt nod. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure you’re fine? Because the last time you did magic in your sleep…” Peter didn’t have to finish the sentence. Beck remembered all too well that the last time he had done magic in his sleep, the imprint of his doppelganger from this Earth had attached himself onto his psyche.

Beck snuck a glance at himself in his reflection in the airplane window. No injuries, no mocap suit, just a handful of fading bruises, a baseball hat, and a plain blue button up. No ghosts were in his head today, it seemed. And yet, the dream was slipping further out of his grasp, the knowledge of just what had unnerved him so much slipping through his fingers like sand through an hourglass.

He carefully sat up a little straighter, pulling the chair out of its reclining position and gave Peter a curt nod. “I’m fine.”

And he really was. What had freaked him out so much? Beck wasn’t sure at this point, but that faint sense of unease stayed with him until the plane touched down on the tarmac in Wakanda.

-

One good thing that had come out of Wakanda opening its borders to the wider world was the removal of the holographic barrier hiding it from detection. What this meant was that as the plane began its descent, its passengers were treated to an absolutely stunning view as the capital city began to peak out from the mountainside, lights shining in an otherwise darkened area.

Nearly all of Team Parker, Beck included, found themselves unable to tear themselves away from the window, watching as the lights in the distance became buildings and roads and the airport tarmac. By the time that the plane had come to a stop and attached itself to the gangway, Peter especially was one step away from breaking down the door to get out and into the beautiful city.

Shuri and a pair of Dora Milaje met the group at the baggage claim. Other airport goers gave the group a few odd looks, but Shuri immediately rushed to Peter, giving him a hug.

“Ugh, I am so excited to meet you!” She carefully released him, giving Peter a wide grin. “You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to this. We can spend time in my lab, maybe upgrade your suit, you can tell me how you make your web fluid…”

Peter seemed a little bit taken aback by Shuri’s exuberance, but to be fair, it was about what he was expecting from her after their text conversations and responded in kind. “And I’m looking forward to getting to see your vibranium technology in action. I’ve seen what your brother can do in that suit. A did some calculations and I think a five percent vibranium weave into my suit fabric would be enough to protect against the small arms and knives I deal with on patrol.”

“I calculated a four percent weave, but we’ll talk about it.” Shuri finally switched her attention to the other members of the group, who had been milling around the baggage carousel waiting for their luggage to arrive. “Ned, I’m so excited to meet you. I think I might have something for you as well. MJ, of course, I think we’re going to get along quite well. Mrs. Parker! We haven’t spoken before but anyone who could raise Peter as he turned out has to be excellent. And you!”

She finally turned on Beck, who had been waiting uncomfortably a few steps away, anxiously waiting for his bag to arrive. “I can’t wait to do a full analysis on your magic. Strange won’t let me run any tests on him and I don’t know any other Sorcerers. And your suit. I need to take a look at it.”

Beck unconsciously covered the two pieces of jewelry that held his armor. “Ah, maybe later.”

“Well of course, I don’t want you causing a scene in an airport.” Shuri lightly punched Beck’s arm before returning to talk to Peter, MJ, and Ned as May and Beck waited for the luggage to arrive.

Which turned out to be a problem. By the time that most of Team Parker’s bags had arrived, the carousel emptied, and the flight number over the area ticked over to the next arrival, Beck’s bag had not yet shown up.

Twenty minutes in the lost baggage office later, the bag was finally located by the system on a flight currently en route to Australia.

Beck buried his head in his hands. “Well, I hope nothing world-ending happens in New York City, because we’re not getting back there any time soon.”

Shuri reassured him that there would be clothes and toiletries waiting for him back at the Palace, but he didn’t particularly care about that. The one irreplaceable thing in that bag had been his sling ring, one of only a handful of things he had left from his world.

-

The arrival at the Palace was nearly as awe inspiring as the descent into the country had been. It was a massive building, with beautiful spires and rounded architecture that reminded Peter of something out of Star Wars. Shuri apologized that her brother wasn’t available to greet them, but that meant that instead of the formal pleasantries that they had been expecting to exchange, the group could go directly down into the lab.

May branched off with a pair of Palace employees to discuss the party that night for Peter, while the rest of Team Parker followed Shuri down a series of steps, into an elevator, and out into her spacious lab area.

“Whoah, is that the Black Panther suit?” Ned and Peter raced across the room to a mannequin that currently held Shuri’s work in progress for the next generation of the suit, helmet and gloves currently off the form and on the desk next to it.

Shuri nodded, following them over as MJ and Beck continued to simply look spellbound at the massive area, and most importantly, out the window into the depths of the vibranium mine. It was beautiful and so different from anything either of them had ever seen before. “I’m currently trying to program the nanites to incorporate the clothing my brother is wearing at the time into their matrix, so that when the suit is deactivated he still has clothing to wear. The original prototypes were meant as an inconspicuous carrier in case he had need for them in an emergency, but they did have the unfortunate side effect of shredding anything he was wearing in the process.”

She flicked a finger towards Beck and gestured for him to come over. MJ remained where she was, inspecting a small necklace that appeared to have some sort of floral design carved out of black rock. She gently reached down to touch it before Shuri all but materialized next to her, “That’s not ready yet, sorry. It’s still unstable.”

MJ gave one of her patented disinterested shrugs, but she was definitely intrigued by whatever it was. Shuri continued as if she believed MJ’s response. “What’s interesting about Stark’s nanotechnology for the Iron Man and Iron Spider suits is that they simply cover whatever the person is wearing, and I have no idea where your suit came from.”

“It’s actually Stark technology as well, just not this world’s Stark,” Beck offered, rolling up his sleeves to reveal the matched set of a watch and wristband that held his armor. “Closer to the Iron Man suit rather than the Iron Spider suit I’d guess, though. It’s built for protection, not mobility.”

Peter added on to that, “And I still don’t like wearing street clothes under the Iron Spider. When I got it I was wearing my old suit underneath it, and nowadays it’s a little bit of overkill. I like the suit I designed better.” He gestured to the suitcase he was still carrying despite the fact that the rest of the luggage had been taken away by Palace employees. “It has all the features that I wanted in it, and it’s just…” He trailed off, looking for the right word. Less painful to wear now that Tony was gone? Fit him better than any other suit he had worn? “…More me, I guess,” he finally settled on, and Shuri seemed to accept that answer.

“Well, we can still make a suit that’s ‘more you’ while giving you better protection and more ease of use. What about you, Beck? You interested in an upgrade?” Shuri pointedly looked at the wristbands, which despite his careful maintenance had seen better days. They had only ever been a prototype, meant for testing in Prague before being upgraded, but then London had come before the lab had a chance to give him the next version, and the rest was history.

Despite that, Beck was leery of giving them up. With his sling ring currently in the lurch, he wasn’t happy about the idea of giving up the only other thing that really tied him back to his home. The padded clothes he had worn under the armor had long since been given up as a lost cause due to damage and wear, and he knew his boots wouldn’t last forever.

But he also knew he couldn’t keep going with the same armor he had forever. He had managed to jury rig a charger for the nanites back at the Sanctum, but every time he wore the suit it worked a little less well, his magic slowly burning it out from the inside.

The decision was made for him, he guessed, as he carefully removed the bands. “Do you have an empty table somewhere?”

Shuri looked around wildly for a moment, before sweeping what appeared to be a series of blueprints off one table and gestured grandly to Beck to continue. Beck walked over, and carefully placed the bands on the table, the wristband inside the watch, and pressed the activation button.

In a wave of nanites, the suit appeared. The armored green undershirt and pants, the golden breastplate, gauntlets, and boots, and the cape. Finally, the helmet appeared, almost pulling the armor off the table from the angle it had been set up at before MJ caught it.

Peter looked at it, intrigued. In the dark of the patrol it had been hard to tell the damage the suit had been taking, but it was clear now that it had seen better days, The breastplate in particular still had dents and scratches from their last few nights, and the cape was pockmarket with holes and was growing threadbare at the bottom.

Shuri tsked as she looked over the armor, somewhere between disappointment in the suit’s current condition and being impressed in its original craftsmanship. She carefully traced the slightly glowing panels on the chest before looking over to Beck. “Do you know anything about how your armor works? Besides defense, what is its purpose?”

“The armor helps to channel and direct my magic. I think that’s the major problem it’s been having here. At home, magic was hard to touch, hard to use. You needed armor like this to help direct your power or else you ended up wasting it. Here, magic is closer to the surface. There’s more of it, it hasn’t been poisoned like my home’s.” He pointed out several of the panels lower down on the chest guard and on the cape. “The higher flow of energy is starting to burn out the system. I can still channel magic without the suit, but I suspect that on this Earth I may have the opposite problem without the suit. Without that external method of control, regulating power fluctuations while trying to channel the most powerful force on this planet becomes much more difficult, and one slip could lead to disaster.”

Shuri raised an eyebrow, tracing the burnt-out panel. “Well, we’d better get on that, then.”

-

The one thing Shuri enjoyed above all others was tinkering in the lab. Having two new superhumans to test and design around meant that it was almost like her birthday, rather than Peter’s. While she had wished that Peter had brought the Iron Spider suit rather than his normal fabric one, the programming of the nanites of Beck’s armor gave her enough to work with to begin.

That being said, there was a lot to look at in Beck’s suit. The conduits to channel magical power were like nothing she had ever seen before – clearly some element of magic had gone into the construction of the armor before it had ever been used. While she tackled the nanite problem, however, Peter, Ned, and MJ were in the middle of redesigning both Peter’s and Beck’s suits.

There were a lot of things that you could do with nanites that you couldn’t do with normal fabric, Peter was realizing as he looked through the options that Shuri had programmed in as defaults. The vibranium infused nanites had the advantage of looking more like fabric than the ones that made up the Iron Spider suit, which he liked a lot.

Not that he wasn’t grateful for the Iron Spider, or that he would ever mothball it for good, given that it was Tony’s second to last gift to him, but sometimes when you’re being the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, you want a Friendly Neighborhood Costume to go with it.

The other advantage to nanites, he was finding, was adaptability. As he and Ned dove further into the settings of the suit design program, he realized there were ways to save multiple presets into the design. That meant that he could keep the changes he had made to his suit with Mysterio’s drones in his back pocket, while still keeping the normal taser web settings for everyday use.

With all that in mind, Peter may have gone a little overboard. Some things in Shuri’s base design needed tweaking, like the setup of the webshooters (she had guessed pretty closely to how they worked, but ended up missing a few internal parts that prevented the webs from hardening before the left the webshooter and would have resulted in them jamming up after the second web), but on the whole her guesses based on what she had seen of his combat style and power set resulted in a base suit design that would have been extremely functional even before Peter started messing with it.

Beck’s suit was another story. Pulling apart the breastplate to reveal the actual power channeling tech inside had been extremely nerve-wracking for everyone in the room, and once the housing had been stripped away the actual state of the wiring was far worse than anyone would have expected. Beck could tell that the suit had probably been one or two uses away from shorting out, or blowing up, or both, with him inside of it.

But once the innards were exposed and Shuri began her scans, she realized she had a good guess as to the basic principles of the suit’s design. The material would be another issue – if she had to guess, vibranium somehow infused with magic during the production of the suit might work, but she wouldn’t know until she tried to construct it. The basic design of the channeling equipment wasn’t unfamiliar, however. It reminded her a lot of the kinetic energy transformation technology inside the Black Panther suit, except instead of storing and releasing kinetic energy, this suit would need to store and release dimensional energy.

But she could work with that, if she had some readings on what exactly Beck was doing when he channeled magic himself. And the easiest way to do that was to treat him and Peter like every other superhero that she had ever met: ask them to put on a show.

-

The rules were simple. Both Peter and Beck would have no technology to aid them other than the bare essentials. For Beck, with his suit in a state of disarray on the table, this meant nothing but his own skills and several monitors that Shuri had hooked up to him where the channeling equipment would normally go to monitor his output. For Peter, that meant his webshooters and nothing else.

“Beyond that,” Shuri had continued, “Go nuts. Any injuries you sustain are easily healed here,” she had gestured then to a handful of kimoyo beads and a medtable, “And I won’t get any usable data if you hold back.”

Beck raised a finger, looking over at Peter who had a wide grin on his face. “I really don’t think this is a good idea. Don’t you think that this kind of testing would be better done in a more controlled environment, maybe with some emergency personnel present? We could really hurt eachother.”

Shuri once again gestured to the beads and the bed before rolling her eyes. “You’ll be fine. I think you overestimate your power, and underestimate how strong the Spiderling is.” She, MJ, and Ned had then taken a generous few paces back, and the battle started.

Peter wasn’t expecting Beck’s level of competency. Obviously he had seen the man fight alongside him a dozen times at this point, but it wasn’t hard to look powerful when you’re wielding magic against a street thug with a gun. If anything, the way that Beck easily slipped out from under Peter’s first punch, stopped him mid-swing with a careful shield and then sliced through his webbing like it was nothing with a single golden blast of magic showed Peter just how caught off guard the man must have been that day in the cabin when they first met.

It just meant that he would have to get creative.

Beck, on the other hand, was struggling. He knew how to make his movements look practiced and easy, but without his suit he was barely dipping his fingers into the vast current of this world’s magic. As he knocked Peter away from him with a carefully aimed blast, he was scared for half a second that the kid wouldn’t get up before Peter sprang to his feet, firing webbing straight back at him.

The kid was fast, he would give him that. He was dodging more than half of the blasts that Beck sent his way, all carefully reigned in to not do anything more than sting. Peter wasn’t holding back, though. As the kid finally slipped past his defenses, Beck wondered for a half second if this wasn’t somehow carefully repressed anger at the original Mysterio before Peter’s fist connected with his head and all his careful control was gone.

Logically, Beck knew something was wrong. This magic was too wild, too hard to control without his suit. It exploded out of him, knocking Peter back into the window looking out into the vibranium mine. The part of his mind not struggling to keep the magic under control was relieved to see the kid slowly pick himself back up, cradling one arm to his chest, but the rest of him was panicking, flailing against the current that threatened to bring him under.

Peter and the others watched in horror as magic seeped out of Beck like a water balloon that someone had pricked with a pin. His once blue eyes, fixed in horror on Peter, had turned solid red-gold, and his hands were engulfed in the same golden fire that he had once wielded so effortlessly, now bursting out of him.

As Beck dropped to his knees, desperately trying to stem the floodgates that he had opened, Peter suddenly had a horrifying flashback to the end of the fight in Prague. Beck was surrounded by the same fire that Mysterio had been then, albeit gold, not green, the same struggle for control clear in every jerky movement he made.

If she survived this, Shuri realized, checking her datapad, she was going to get quite a lot of interesting data.

Beck lost the fight. The magic exploded out from him in a perfect sphere of golden fire, knocking everything away from him. Ned, MJ, and Shuri dove for cover behind a table as the sound of broken glass followed.

Everything was dark. Peter carefully picked himself up from where he had been thrown against the window again. He was pretty sure his left arm was broken, and a tentative test of his webshooters showed them to have been fried by the power surge as well.

“Oh, no, no, Mister Beck!” He could see where the man had collapsed in the center of the room, smoking slightly, a few sparks of magic still playing around his fingers. Peter ran over, carefully placing his fingers on Beck’s neck before immediately pulling them away as a shock of magic startled him. Slowly he reached down again, relaxing slightly as no shock came this time, then relaxed the rest of the way as he felt Beck’s pulse beneath his fingers. The man was alive, at least, but not getting up any time soon if the way he lay on the ground, curled up tightly into a ball, was any indication.

Shuri, MJ, and Ned carefully poked their heads up from the table they hid behind.

“Is he dead?” MJ’s tone was flat, trying to sound disinterested, but Peter could hear the concern in her voice.

Peter shook his head. “Still alive, but he’s pretty out of it. Shuri, about that medtable?”

That would be a problem. Shuri gestured to the darkened lab, the only light coming in from the window into the mine. “Your friend knocked out the power and triggered the emergency lockdown.”

Ned looked back at the door to the elevator, then quickly around the lab. “Emergency lockdown?” His voice was just on the edge of panic. “That doesn’t sound too good.”

“It’s not.” Shuri hit her tabled with the heel of her hand, hoping by some miracle that it would turn on. “Only two people have the codes to turn off the lockdown. It’s only supposed to go of in case of a cataclysmic event within the lab, which I suppose your friend’s loss of control would count.”

“I’m guessing you’re one of the people with the codes. Who’s the other?” MJ carefully turned the table they had hid behind back to its normal orientation before perching on top of it.

“My brother.” Shuri frowned, looking almost sheepish. “If lockdown goes off, both of us are supposed to get an alert.”

“I’m guessing there’s a but in there somewhere?” MJ crossed her arms over her chest, having a pretty good idea of where this was going.

“But, I hacked the system so he wouldn’t get notified because I was working on some dangerous things, and as long as the power was on, I can override it from my tablet. But with the power out, I can’t get into my tablet.” Shuri shrugged again, her tone definitely sheepish now. “They’ll figure out what happened in a couple hours, we’ll be fine.”

“A couple hours? What about Beck? He could be really hurt!” Peter gestured emphatically at the man in question, who was still smoking slightly and hadn’t moved. “There’s got to be a way to get the power back on.”

“Maybe.” Shuri looked around the lab, her familiarity with her space helping her work out what the indistinct piles in the gloom were after everything had been tossed around by Beck’s explosion. “Yes! I have an idea.”

It was a long shot, but that was what Shuri dealt with. Technological long shots on the edge of the possible that she made possible through her wit and expertise. Carefully picking her way through the debris, she found what she was looking for fairly quickly. The fact that the current prototype of the Black Panther suit was glowing a bright purple from the concussive force of the blast that it had absorbed was helpful.

She carefully maneuvered it over to the central work station, explaining her plan. “This suit is meant to absorb and redistribute kinetic energy. If we find a way to convert it to electrical energy and trip the system, it should trigger a full system reboot of the lab safety procedures. It’ll still be a mess in here, and a lot of my electronics may be fried, but it should be fixable without anyone finding out what happened down here.”

There was quite a bit of vigorous nodding from Ned, MJ, and Peter, who definitely didn’t want Aunt May finding out about the very short lived superhero fight club that had occurred. With the basic plan in motion, the four of them set about dividing tasks. Since Shuri was the only one who knew her way around the lab, she led the other three on a scavenger hunt around the room, picking up pieces that could be used to build the transformer.

From there, the tasks were easy enough to set up. Shuri would create the hookup to the suit that would drain the energy to begin with, while Ned, with his experience in managing strange energy sources from his tinkering with the Chitauri energy core, would set up the inductive charging plate that could kickstart the tablet. That left Peter and MJ working on everything in between the two ends of the system, while both occasionally taking a break to check on Beck.

That was the worrying thing that kept all of them working as fast as they could carefully go. Beck still hadn’t moved in the slightest from the position he had fallen in, and Peter could tell that either he was running a fever, or the magic was still burning in him inside. Either option wasn’t good, and they needed to get the contraption working as soon as possible.

-

Beck was drowning. When he had first been accepted as an Acolyte, the current Master of the Mystic Arts at the academy he was trained in had done what was done to all who wanted to take on the mantle of Sorcerer: throw their astral form through the multiverse to show them exactly what was at stake should they lose the fight against the Elementals and allow them to move on to another dimension.

This experience was similarly terrifying, the loss of control and total surrender to the currents of magic making Beck feel like he was sixteen years old again, fresh from the loss of his family and his home with nothing he could believe in to steady him.

But it wasn’t just that that worried him. What worried him was the undercurrents in the magic that he could feel, the tide of darkness slowly seeping into this world the way it had his home so long ago. Something was coming. Something big.

His mind flashed back to what little he could remember of his dream on the plane. The unfamiliar hall, surrounded by unfamiliar faces. The portal that had warped its way through space, golden sparks distorted in color like oil in water. Figures stepping through, hidden by smoke and ash. A flash of red. A flash of black.

The current took him again and Beck thought no more for a time.

-

Given what they were working with, construction was proceeding surprisingly well. There had been a few pinched fingers, a few jolts of energy that sparked along the connection before they were ready, but inside of twenty minutes the four decided they were happy enough with their results to give it a try.

Ned, MJ, and Shuri all took a few steps back. Ned looked at the table beside them, like he was considering whether it might be a good idea to take shelter before deciding to trust what they had built. Peter closed his eyes, whispered a quick prayer to no one in particular, and connected the last lead.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then, the wires began to glow white hot as the energy slowly transferred out of the Black Panther suit and into the contraption they had built. Peter carefully stepped away, watching the energy run along the wires and into the charging plate.

Then nothing. The four of them held their breath, praying that it would work, and then-

And then the tablet screen lit up, and they breathed a collective sigh of relief.

From there it was a matter of minutes for Shuri to frantically enter in her override codes, and for the group to sigh in relief as the lights flickered back on.

Of course, that made the elephant in the room all the more clear. The room looked like a bomb had gone off – which to be fair, one kind of had – with Beck’s motionless body still curled in the center of the debris field. The four carefully lifted him into the small medbay, Shuri whistling under her breath long and low as the readings started coming in.

From what she could tell with her limited knowledge of Sorcery, Beck had managed almost close the floodgates of magic running through him, but enough was getting through to trap him in a state that seemed close to REM sleep. If she could stem the tide of magic, bringing him out of the dream state would be easy enough. It would be stopping the flow that would be the problem.

“How’s he looking?” Peter came up beside her, worry written across his face.

Shuri shook her head. “As far as I can tell, he’s physically ok. For now.”

“For now?”

A handful of gestures later and Shuri had highlighted the central nervous system on the holographic display of Beck’s vital functions. “The magic running through him is almost like an electric current. It’s trapped his mind in a dream state so he can’t regulate it, and without any regulation, it’s going to burn him out eventually. We have time until that happens, but not much.”

Shuri looked around her devastated lab again, glad to see that the design and production table for nanites was starting to come back online. “Peter, I’m sorry, but your suit might have to wait a little. We need to get Beck awake first.”

The four clustered around the design table. Shuri swept the designs for Peter’s upgraded suit off of the interface, bringing up the data that she had gotten during Beck’s display up. “I’m going to work on the channeling system. You three, I’m leaving the aesthetics up to you.”

Of course, the split didn’t happen that simply. Within half an hour of work, all three of Ned, MJ, and Peter had made suggestions for the channeling system for the armor, as well as ways to make sure that it could remain active while the suit was in storage mode. From a purely appearance basis, the suit looked remarkably similar to the original, even down to the fishbowl helmet (there had been a lot of back and forth on that, but the consensus had been that Beck identified too closely with his suit as his last connection to his home dimension, and that the helmet was too iconic to remove, however dumb it might look). The chest guard was made a little less bulky, the colors tweaked a little to a less saturated blue green on the undershirt and pants, the gold a little closer to bronze. The cloak was left alone thanks to Peter’s protests of how special it was in design to Beck.

The real crowning jewel, however, was the active channeling system. When not in use, the twin wristbands – still a green and gold watch and a red metal wristband, as they always had been – would siphon off excess dimensional energy that Beck channeled, using it to keep the nanites charged and repaired.

Shuri made sure that last little bit was locked down and hard encoded in her database. While she was generally a trusting individual who wanted to share her discoveries, something in the back of her mind warned her that if someone unsavory got their hands on those designs, it could easily be turned into a weapon against a Sorcerer, magic handcuffs that would drain their magic until they were no stronger than a regular human.

Then it was the moment of truth. Ned and MJ watched from a safe distance as Shuri and Peter carefully placed the revamped wristbands on Beck and stepped away.

The change was immediately obvious. Beck’s eyes snapped open, unseeing, glowing golden as his back arched on the table. Shuri and Peter locked eyes nervously, both considering whether they should step in as Beck gasped for breath, fingers reaching out for magic that wasn’t coming.

Shuri frantically grabbed her tablet, decreasing the power drain on the wristbands as Beck continued to jerk erratically on the table, gasping for breath. Then he stopped, slumping on the table and panting as the golden glow slowly faded from his eyes.

“Mister Beck?” Peter carefully moved in, waiting as Beck’s eyes slowly focused in on him.

Beck let out a low huff that might have been a laugh. “Guess you won, kid.” His eyes slid closed and he relaxed on the table. Peter frantically looked over at Shuri, who shook her head.

“He’s only sleeping. The magic took quite a toll on his system.” She looked around the room again, making mental notes of which projects had been destroyed all together, and which were salvageable. “We have about two hours until your party is supposed to happen. Give me a hand with picking up around here, and we’ll see about making your suit?”

-

Within an hour, the lab had been returned to the state of semi-organized chaos it had been when the five of them had entered to begin with. The production of Peter’s suit went smoothly as he also opted for a paired set of suit holders. The simple Iron Man themed bracelet and cheesy-looking Spider-Man watch (Shuri had refused to budge on that one) could be activated both in webshooter only mode, or to release the entire Spider-Man suit. In appearance it was almost exactly like the one Peter had designed for himself on the plane ride to London, but it had a variable set of traits controlled by both voice and gesture commands for a variety of situations.

It was by far one of the coolest presents that Peter had ever gotten, although it would have been nice to get a suit that wasn’t made at a time of crisis. The first suit had been given to him before the fight in Berlin, then as he fell from a spaceship, then on his way to a fight in London, and now as someone he was coming to respect as another mentor-like figure in his life lay unconscious on a medtable, unable to control his magic.

“Hey, just to be clear, no one says anything about this when we go upstairs, right?” Peter looked at the other members of the group, who all nodded wordlessly.

To be fair, what were they going to say? Hey, we wanted to make new super suits for Beck and Peter, so they fought, Beck exploded and almost destroyed the lab but he’s fine ish right now, other than probably having to wear those magic channeling wristbands for the foreseeable future until he gets his magic under control again? Yeah that would go over really well with Aunt May.

With fifteen minutes to go until showtime, Beck finally woke up. He felt like shit, which really wasn’t surprising, but he also felt better than he had his entire time on this Earth. He felt… settled, almost. He carefully summoned a spark of magic to his fingertips, feeling the drain as the excess magic that he couldn’t quite control was siphoned away to the wristbands.

He had moved to beginning his precombat spells by the time that the other four people in the room realized he was up. They watched, still somewhat worried, as he ran through the practiced motions, floating a few inches above the ground as the channeling mandalas were set up on his arms and hands. The magic came easier than it ever had. It wasn’t like the unsatisfying trickle he had always had at home, or the uncontrollable rush it normally was. The magic came smoothly to his command, doing exactly what he asked of it and nothing more or less, the wristbands smoothly siphoning away the rest.

To the outside observer, there were still signs that things weren’t quite right. The golden glow still suffused Beck’s irises as he channeled, but it wasn’t the pure gold sheen that had covered his entire eye when it was uncontrolled. It just different. Not bad different, not good different, just different.

And when he stopped channeling, when he made the conscious decision to let the magic go, oh wonder of wonders it did. It didn’t keep battering against the floodgates, threatening to rush through and overwhelm him. It just flowed into the wristbands until the gates were well and truly sealed, and Beck felt more balanced than he ever had.

“Whoah.” Ned looked like he wanted to start clapping, but settled for an approving look. “You ok, man?”

Beck nodded before almost falling as he tried to take a few steps, unconsciously tapping back into his magic to steady himself. “I think I’m going to be. Princess Shuri, I do apologize for the state of your lab-”

Shuri cut him off before he could continue. “That was awesome! I’m definitely going to need to run some more tests on those wristbands, though. You have my number, we’ll set something up once you’ve had a week or two to get used to the new suit.”

-

Somehow, after all that, Peter’s birthday dinner was still the highlight of the day. After the watch and bracelet from Shuri (which he demonstrated for Aunt May and an amused T’Challa, who recognized his sister’s craftsmanship in the suit), the other presents from May (the newest model of calculator that he had been asking for for ages. It could do symbolic math! It was super cool!), Ned (the newest model of the Lego Millennium Falcon, which the two of them had been planning to buy and put together as a pair forever) and MJ (a box set of true crime novels that she had been trying to get Peter to read for ages) would have seemed anticlimactic to anyone else, but Peter knew the thought that had gone into each of the gifts.

Beck, of course, sheepishly explained that his present had been on his luggage which was currently somewhere in San Francisco on its journey back to New York, where they would pick it up on their flight home, but Peter didn’t care. He would have gladly given up all his presents for this time with his friends, with no world ending threats to deal with, just the consequences of the half-baked ideas of a bunch of teenagers.

-

In the days to come, Peter would look back on these moments and recognize them as the turning point before his life got incredibly complicated. Not that the life of a seventeen-year-old superhero wasn’t already complicated enough already, of course.

But things were on the horizon. Friendships would be tested, new friends would be made, and just maybe, some old ones would come back.

All things come in time. But for now, Peter was happy and safe with his closest friends left in this world, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.


End file.
